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Updated: June 5, 2025
Kamelillo said he was "old boy all right," but Kamelillo's notions of what was virtuous weren't civilised notions. A man ought to be honest. I've known thieves that were singular human. He was mighty happy when he was a king, was Julius R. It happened in the year '84 that I took in sailing orders at Hong-Kong to go round to Rangoon for a cargo of teak wood.
Craney came one day with a bundle of charts, and he collected me and Kamelillo in a corner and spread his charts on the deck. They were old charts. "Now," he says, "here is the lines of trade." He had the regular routes all marked on his charts. "There appears to be some vacant spaces," he says. And there did. "And here's about the biggest!" And it was.
He'd sit out on the end of a log moonlight nights, with his fat face and spectacles shining, and Liebchen would muzzle around with a ten-foot snout like an engine boiler, and a piggy eye; and he'd sing German lullabies; "Du bist wie eine Blume." I didn't think she was like a flower. She was more like an oil tank. So Kreps would sing to her in the moonlight, but Kamelillo didn't like her.
But they kept on till there was only a black spot near the edge of the sky. It came on afternoon. The tide was out, and we lay about. There was not enough wind to flutter the signal on the bluffs, which was Kreps' red shirt, and hung there to entertain any one that might come by. Kamelillo suddenly sat up. "Hear im?" he says.
Kreps was a man very given to sentiments, in particular about "Ewigweibliche," and I never knew a man that kept himself more entertained. He settled down for the time, with Veronica and Kamelillo for his family, in a fine house in the upper town of San Francisco. Kamelillo used to cook unlikely things which Kreps and Veronica ate peaceable between them.
Kamelillo thought he'd been there before, but he didn't remember when; but if he had, it stuck in his mind, there was some trouble connected with it, and with one he called a "bad-lot chief"; but I told Craney that Kamelillo had seen too many islands and too much strong drink in his career, and he might be thinking of something that happened in New Zealand.
"It iss not of use," said Kreps, and he sighed. "You understand not de yearning, de ideal. Listen! Liebchen, she iss de abstraction, de principle. Aber no. You cannot. De soul iss alone, iss not comprehend." "All right," says Kamelillo. "You look here. Go see thas girl whale on a bamboo raft. No good sit on log all night, sing hoohoo song." Kreps was taken with that notion.
Liebchen passed close beneath us. Seemed like she felt mortified. Kreps broke down, but Kamelillo was gay. "Dam hen!" he says, and grabbed Veronica with both hands. "Go too!" and he flung her at Liebchen, and she went through the air squawking and fluttering. She lit on Liebchen's slippery back, and she slid till she struck the bamboo, and roosted.
We slid a tree down under the water, and then another, and so on, till it was a messy-looking channel, a sort of log jam, with roots and palm-tree tops mixed in, which I thought the tide would float out, and it did afterward, some of it. Then we went back to where Kamelillo was cooking, squatted on the shore with his bare back turned to the water. He took no interest in Liebchen.
If she had had time to think she might have flopped ashore, but she was flustered, and Liebchen got out of the channel and steered into the Pacific. Veronica squawked a few times, and no more. The sea was quiet. The two moved off, going eastward very slow. Kamelillo went back to his camp fire and made poi, but Kreps and I watched, expecting that Liebchen would go under and Veronica be lost.
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